The present invention generally relates to collaborative video annotation.
Video annotation interfaces to facilitate communication between different stakeholders have been explored by different groups. Interfaces have been developed to support multimedia annotation as educational tools for the distance learning market, such as the Classroom 2000 project and the Microsoft Research Annotation System. The “WACTool” supports P2P capabilities that allow user collaboration and content sharing using voice and digital ink comments over individual frames of a video. “Project Pad” is a standalone web application for adding text notes to media clips and sharing those notes with others. “Video Image Annotation” tool is a Windows application that provides an interface to manually annotate a video with text. “VideoANT” is a web-based video annotation application developed for e-learning, to annotate videos with time point markers and text. “Advene” allows people to design and exchange videos with annotations. “Anvil” is another tool that allows annotation of audiovisual material by inserting time-anchored comments and gesture elements.
There are many video-based interfaces with text annotation that are commercially available. Youtube allows user to annotate videos they upload, and others can see the annotation. “BubblePLY” is a web application that allows users to annotate remote videos hosted on other websites such as Youtube. Users can add text, drawing, pre-defined clipart, subtitles etc. on a remote video to create bubbles (annotated videos) and can edit their own bubbles. “veotag” and “viddler” also support annotations of video content. Sports and News broadcast domains have also seen a significant amount of work dealing with video annotations.
The applications discussed typically support annotations in only one form (mostly text) and lack multimodal capabilities. None of these applications support fine-grained access and navigational control, multimodal annotation grouping, rich annotation positioning and user-based color coding. All of the applications discussed allow some form of video annotation but none of them comprehensively address the issues of collaboratively working on a creative temporal project, such as dance.
A need exists for improvement in collaborative video annotation. This, and other needs, are addressed by one or more aspects of the present invention.